


Rolling Home

by withthebreezesblown



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, F/M, Seriously Angsty, i'm so sorry celery, i’m not a good person, maybe not for the squeamish, the gift no one wanted, this is probably the darkest thing i’ve ever written, uhhh so this is a "gift fic"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-17
Updated: 2019-05-17
Packaged: 2020-03-06 21:18:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18859315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthebreezesblown/pseuds/withthebreezesblown
Summary: So when one participates in a fic gift exchange, there is probably an assumption that one ought to write something that the giftee would, you know, actuallywantto receive, but instead I wrote this really, incredibly dark and miserable “what if Fíriel and Alistair’s daughter was affected by the taint” AU forCeleritasSagittae, because I am a terrible person who should never be allowed to participate in a fanwork gift exchange ever again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CeleritasSagittae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeleritasSagittae/gifts).



> I'm so sorry, Celery. I'll write you something nice one day, I promise.
> 
> If you don’t know Celery’s Fíriel Mahariel, I can’t recommend _Cleaving_ enough. It’s gorgeous and sweet and aching and poignant.

**Stage One**

The closer he gets to the Vigil, the faster he moves. By the time he leaves his horse at the stables, just this once letting a wide eyed recent recruit take his responsibility for caring for the beast from him—Maker, knows it’s a responsibility he had down pat by age nine, and just because he’s Warden-Lieutenant doesn’t mean he can’t do it himself, but it’s been two months since he’s seen her—he’s running up the steps and through the hallways. It’s only in an open doorway that he finally stops, quietly watching as Sigrun sits, an amused smile on her face while a child of four stands before her, drawing lines on the dwarf’s face in ink with Fíriel’s quill.

After a moment the little girl stops to admire her work. “There. Now your tattoo isn’t about what caste you don’t belong to anymore. It’s about clan. Because mamae says the Wardens are our clan too.” She has turned Sigrun’s casteless mark into a vallaslin.

He can’t help himself. He swoops in then, lifting the girl and wiggling her in the air before pulling her to him, smooth cheek against rough, their hair falling together in an indistinguishable mass of the same shade of gold. He has a good idea what Keeper Lanaya will have to say about such notions when his daughter spends the summer months with the clan, and it stays his tongue from encouraging the girl. Of course he would adore his daughter if she were a rotten little monster, he knows, but he loves her all the more for her open heart.

“Daddy!” Anneth throws her little arms around his neck, laughing, and it’s a long moment before he finally sets her down, smoothing messy hair away from her face as he thinks that she’s grown visibly just in the time that he’s been away. It’s then that he notices.

It’s a moment that he will carry with him every moment of his life after it. It’s the moment when another universe, one where he and his family are happy and life is simple, slips past him and leaves him here, in this one, where there is nothing untainted. When he understands that Fíriel was wrong when she told him he deserved this happiness they had made together, and what he knew so well before she came along was right: he wasn’t meant to be loved like this. It’s a poison in his daughter’s blood, making itself visible in the pale purple of a new bruise, a tangle of veins at her temple, running up her ear and down her jaw.

How many times has he seen it begin like this? How many times has he held hands lined with black veins that had started out purple like this while the person swallowed the potion he’d offered and waited for it to work?

It’s like poison, the way his body reacts, cold and numb and nauseous, and all he knows is this: there will be no Quiet Death for his daughter.

It’s a week before Fíriel returns to the keep, and she’s hardly dismounted before he’s pushing her back towards the horse, their child trailing behind, watching Dworkin grinding something in a pestel with an interest that would have worried him once, when he still had space inside himself for worry and fear beyond what he already bears.

“We need to go to Soldier’s Peak.”

His wife reacts to his seriousness instantly, one hand pushing away the strand of hair that rests on her cheek as she grabs his arm to still him and make him look at her. “Alistair? What’s wrong?”

He stares at her heavily, trying to find the words. Finally he just calls for their daughter, and when she comes he lifts her and pushes her loose hair behind her ear without speaking.

Another woman might have cried, have raged, begged the Maker to take it back. Fíriel only stiffens, her face growing harder and harder with an expression that says only, _No_. And then she is the one pushing him toward the horses impatiently.

By the time they arrive, the veins on their daughter’s face have deepened to a shade of indigo and spread further along Anneth’s diminutive neck and across her forehead.

Avernus takes only one look at the child before his eyes move between Fíriel and Alistair. “If I had found a cure, I would have sent word. I don’t know what you think I can do for her that I can’t do for any other creature tainted with the Blight.”

In an instant Fíriel has the mage pinned against the wall, a dagger at his throat. “If you enjoy not being dead yourself, I suggest you rethink that.” She stares at the man with a terrible coldness, and all Alistair can think to do his is turn his daughter’s face away, into his chest, because even he, who knows her well, does not know what she will do now.

“What I said before. About keeping your work… _ethical_ … I don’t care. I don’t care what you have to do. You will save her, or I will kill _you_.”

“Fíriel…” Alistair’s voice is rough, hesitant. He understands—it is their daughter; how could he not? But this… If they cross this line, even if it’s for their child, what will it make them?

“Take Anneth outside.”

“ _Fíriel_.” His voice is a plea, but he doesn’t know what for.

“ _Take her outside, Alistair_.”

And he does. Later, when they bring the vial filled with a thick liquid the color of rust, he says nothing as Fíriel holds it to Anneth’s lips and tilts it, her hand covering the girl’s mouth when she gags and tries to spit.

“I thought there was no cure?” His voice is hollow. He is not sure he wants to know what they have forced down his daughter’s throat or how it came to be.

“Avernus doesn’t have one. But this will buy me time. I’m going to find the Architect.” Fíriel’s voice is distant, and he does not think he has ever felt so far away from her, not even when she was just some angry elf who might not even survive her Joining, not when she killed Tamlen and he watched a piece of her die with her clanmate.

She does not even return with them the the Vigil. But before they part she kisses him, hard, fierce, and wraps her arms around him and Anneth together. “It’s going to be okay.”

Her voice dares anyone or anything to contradict her in a tone that almost frightens even him. Instead he feels a rush of emotions that create a pressure in his chest as though they are really there, vying with each other for space. He and Fíriel speak at the same time, like the chorus of a song. “I love you.”

Back at the Vigil, he watches his daughter carefully. He counts on Sigrun, Velanna, Nathaniel and Oghren to watch the other Wardens, to be sure they understand that no one dare interfere with the child. Those who whisper find themselves on latrine duty for weeks. One woman who everyone hears make comment about how _it isn’t right_ is transferred to the Free Marches. There’s a man who said the child ought to be put down like the monster she’s becoming who hasn’t been seen in weeks, and no one asks what happened to him.

The spread of the taint in Anneth’s blood does seem to have slowed, though it certainly hasn’t stopped. It takes a whole month for the lines to make their way as far again across her cheeks as they had in a week. It’s three months before they begin to creep over her nose.

He’s watching her sleep, so blissfully unaware of how her body is betraying her. He thinks of the day he watched her draw on Sigrun’s face, of what vallaslin means to this little girl, a child of two worlds. If there is no cure, he realizes, _this_ is the only vallaslin she will ever bear.

He puts his head in his hands and prays.


	2. Chapter 2

**Stage Two**

Anneth is dancing. She’s five now, a birthday that came and went with only a letter and a package from her mother, a little bundle of long arms and legs that should be gangling, and some of her movements are, but every now and then he sees a glimpse of grace that reminds him of Fíriel on the occasions he’s watched her dance with her people. He’s trying to figure out which of the Dalish songs she’s dancing to. She seems to lose the rhythm every so often, but when she finds it, he’s sure it’s something he’s heard before; he can see the way her movements match up with something once heard, half-remembered.

It’s only in his sleep that he finds the answer, understands she’d never lost the rhythm at all; that’s just the way the song that has been the background noise to his life since he was twenty-years-old works, broken and jagged pieces in the midst of the terrible beauty, always calling the listener towards itself.

The next time he sees her dancing, he has to bite back the anger and the resentment that aren’t meant for her at all. Because he cannot yell at her that it is a terrible song that she should never listen to, he does the only other thing he can think of. He picks her up and spins her around.

“That’s not a good song. Let’s dance to something else instead.” He grasps for anything, and the only thing that comes to his is more nursery rhyme than song, but he supposes that will do fine, because it’s catchy with its silly rhymes, and maybe if he sings it to her enough she’ll learn to sing it on her own to tune out the song he does not want her to hear.

He lets her whack him on the head everytime they sing the word whack in the refrain, which makes her giggle. He doesn’t even remember now where he learned the rhyme–before Isolde, before the stables–but he remembers singing once for Eamon and being told he was very clever for remembering it all. It’s a bittersweet memory, but he’d dredge up far worse for this, to hear his daughter laugh.

When he catches her singing it to herself later, on her own, he feels a rush of _gratitude_ to the rhyme for existing at all, for being able to drown out for a moment the call of the song that he understands now plays so much louder and clearer already for his daughter than it does for him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Stage Three**

He is wondering for the thousandth time how his daughter manages to tangle her hair this badly in the span of a single day, working away at a particularly bad snarl as she sings to herself. She stops on the word “hive” to make a buzzing noise like bees when the comb suddenly gives. He can only stare as the entire mat of hair falls to the floor in a clump. When she turns and whacks him on the head as part of her song, he doesn’t even react.

“Daddy? What’s wrong?” She looks at him wide-eyed, and the candle light catches the faintest hint of milky glaze over the green she gets from her mother. Even in the gold light, her skin is washed out, all the warm tones leached away, and the veins that run across her face stand out against it black as ink.

And for the first time, it is almost too much. He suddenly wishes he were the one hunting the Deep Roads for some trace of the emissary that is their only tenuous hope while Fíriel sits here and watches their daughter wither.

He swallows the thought back as soon as he’s had it; what it feels like, watching this, he’d wish it on no one, and especially not the woman he loves. And he has more faith in Fíriel to do the impossible and find the Architect than he’s ever had in himself.

As he pulls Anneth into his arms, not just because he does not want her to see the tears that he won’t let fall but that he can’t keep from gathering, another reason he would not trade rises in him, greedy and desperate. If this is all of the time his daughter has, then he would spend it nowhere but beside her.


	4. Chapter 4

**Stage Four**

He’s looking for Anneth. He’d let her sleep in, but she’d woke groggy and grumpy, wanting only to be left alone. He hasn’t seen her in hours.

The scream sends him running. Velanna is standing in the foyer while one of the large entry doors thuds shut, staring at her hand as it drips blood on the floor.

The look on her face when she meets his eyes is one of surprise, but she wipes it blank in an instant.

He can feel the ripple of her magic, and then she gives him a silent nod and turns on her heel as though there is nothing to be said.

“Velanna, _what happened_?”

She turns slowly, looks at him with that blank expression for a moment and then directs her gaze somewhere around his left ear. “Nothing. It was an accident. It was nothing.”

Even with the healing that has stopped the bleeding, there’s visible divet in her hand where the flesh is missing.

He isn’t stupid. Darkspawn are mean creatures, and he’s seen bites like this and worse before. He feels everything inside of himself fall.

“Anneth,” is all he says.

Velanna’s face tightens and her voice is a hiss when she speaks. “She didn’t mean to.”

_No_ , he thinks. No, Anneth the little girl didn’t mean to. But then that isn’t _really_ who had done it.

He wonders who Velanna, always the first and the fiercest to defend Anneth, even sees when she looks at his daughter, finally more ghoul than girl. A sister she couldn’t save? Whoever it is she sees, it’s someone who’s gone now.

He leaves her still dripping blood onto the stone floor.

It doesn’t take him long to find the child, now that he dares to look for her the one way that he had been so purposefully been blocking out before. He opens up his Warden senses and, among a crowd of tainted men, he looks for the monster.

He doesn’t know if it is worse or better that she’s crying when he finds her. That this little piece of her should be left when nothing else is seems unfair, but he cannot imagine looking into her eyes, pale and filmy as they are, and not seeing her inside them.

When he squats down and opens his arms she runs to him. When she opens her mouth to cry out, “ _Daddy_ ,” there’s blood between her teeth.

“It’s okay. I’m here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

One hand rubs circles on her back while the other holds her head against him. He begins to sing, his arms tensing, holding her face firmly into his chest tighter and tighter until the struggle stops and she goes limp.

He carries what was once his daughter back to the keep. Because he does not know what else to do, he puts her in his bed and pulls the covers up under her chin, brushing the few strands of hair that remain away from her face, and he sits down to write a letter telling his wife to come back.


	5. Chapter 5

**Epilogue**

**__** _Ten years later_

It’s quiet here, in this dark, remote section of the Deep Roads, once Fíriel’s ragged, labored breathing stops. He keeps holding her limp hand for a moment before he lets it slide from his grip as he straightens. There’s a mass of darkspawn he can feel, not far. The only reason they aren’t already making their way towards him, he thinks wryly, as though it is an amusing thought, is because there’s so little that’s human left in him that they don’t even recognize it.

There’s enough though. There’s just enough for this, for him to pull his sword from its sheath, letting the metal tip trail along the ground with a terrible screeching sound as he makes his way towards them. He begins to sing, as loud as he can, just loud enough to take the edge off the other song that calls, loud enough to announce the humanity that, even if the darkspawn can’t sense it, he still holds on to, as tightly as he once held his daughter to him.

“This old man, he played one…”


End file.
